I saw this in another thread on /c/Showerthoughts. I think it’s important for this to be circulated widely so that the broader Fediverse community is aligned. We don’t want admins second-guessing their decisions when users start infighting. We should be united in our thinking and ready to protect our platform.
Great read!
I remember me using software called trillian that supported logins to all chat networks, so I could use ICQ, Google, MSN and AOL all at the same time
Oh man, I remember Trillian, too. That was great. Must have been a nightmare to build, though
It was “just” a bunch of clients in one though, AFAIK it couldn’t connect people from different protocols.
Pidgin still exists; I used it probably 20 years back on Linux.
Ahh, I recall using Pidgin, too. I think i ended up favoring it over Trillian. I already had accounts on all the services, so it worked out. I guess thinking about it, if only basic chat was supported, it may not have been terrible supporting everything
Having never heard of it, I tried Pidgin just now, and it’s kinda exactly what I’ve always wanted. Discord support is really rough, though…
Woo Pidgin still exists? Lovely
Technically! It seems… ill-equipped for the modern world, though.
Hmmm… might have a new open source project to contribute to
I also remember when XMPP wa still the cool kid on the block. Gtalk and other chat networks supported it and allowed federation. I tan my own XMPP server and could talk to users on other servers and even networks. But then Google cut the federation and eventually all external access.
It could have been the next email, but big corporations were already in the chat space and they all walked in their user base.
I’m fairly certain that if email (SMTP) hadn’t been the dominant protocol, we would have walled gardens there as well.
the internet without the existance of email as a de-facto proof of identity and account recovery protocol would certainly be interesting.
almost every single site these days requires you to have an email to sign up. it would be interesting to know what system we would have used instead if email wasn’t an option.
I was using Miranda for the same thing.
Just found out Matrix can do this, although you need to host your own server. There is also Beeper for a fully-managed product, but you need to wait to get access.
I use to use Pidgin then move to Kopete. It even baffled me at one point how Kopete could connect to Facebook messenger and chat with my friends from Kopete and customize the chat interface to my liking. Good times good times.
The internet truly became a much more closed place :(